


wolf trap

by tsunderegraham



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: (sometimes), M/M, Pre-Canon, Supernatural Elements, Will Graham Has a Nice Day, alternate title: Will Graham Sees A Ghost, hannibal shows up at the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:00:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27299071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsunderegraham/pseuds/tsunderegraham
Summary: Will has a strange encounter in the woods near his new house.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	wolf trap

**Author's Note:**

> disclaimer: wolf trap is a real place in virginia, but here, i'm starting from scratch :-)

Newcomers did not often appear in Wolf Trap. The town was bisected by a highway but still small enough to miss even if one were looking for it. There was one exit in, through Vienna, that was unmarked, and the single gas station half a mile from the off-ramp saw more patrons asking for directions out than filling up their tanks on their way in. One was more likely to wind up in Wolf Trap by accident than by intention.

Roy Bailey, one of the town’s lifelong residents, could attest to that. He had grown up in the woods, far from where Vienna and Wolf Trap’s town limits met, and lived in Wolf Trap still, now close enough to the edge of Vienna that he could hear the thrum of cars coming down the Dulles highway even in the dead of night. Every morning at the crack of dawn he walked past the town limits to the gas station and took his post as its sole attendant. It was an uneventful job, especially after forty years, but far from boring. Since Virginia had reinstated self-service at gas stations his responsibilities were mostly changing the gas price signs and helping confused out-of-towners find their way back to the highway. And although he no longer needed to pump their gas, he often came out and conversed with locals while they were filling up. In fact, he asserted confidently that he was able to recognize anybody who lived in town and rule out anybody who did not.

It was close to eight P.M. on a Friday when a station wagon Roy didn’t recognize pulled up at one of the pumps. He stood up from his stool and went to help the young man who emerged.

“You lost, son?”

The man turned around with a start. He held his wallet in one hand and adjusted his glasses with the other. “Sorry?”

Roy chuckled. The man wasn’t lost at all. “Forgive me. It’s a small town, so I tend to assume folks I don’t recognize need some re-orienting.” He paused. “You new to town?”

“I am. Just moved here from D.C.”

“D.C., huh? We don’t often get city folk out here.”

The man shrugged, and his thick curls and bright eyes suggested to Roy that he couldn’t be older than twenty-five, at most no more than thirty. But there was a weariness about him that usually manifested in the older. Or those who had seen too much.

“I wanted a change of scenery, I guess.”

Roy grinned. “Then you’ve come to the right place. Wolf Trap gets a full change of scenery about four times a year.” He offered a hand. “Roy Bailey. We’re sure to meet again since I’m the sole attendant here. Been a while since I had to introduce myself.”

The young man took his hand and gave it a quick but firm shake. The frames of his glasses just barely obscured the blues of his eyes. “I’m Will. Will Graham.”

“You a farmer?” Roy asked. While Wolf Trap was littered with cabins and cottages, most of the properties around were farms. It lent its convenience, too, with being so far out from a grocery store.

“I’m a professor,” Will said. “But I know a thing or two.”

Roy nodded with a hum of approval. “Then you’ll adjust well here.”

“You tell that to everyone who moves here?”

“Not since ’94.” Roy smiled. “We really don’t get a lot of newcomers here. But I mean it. I have a good feeling.”

“What makes you say that?”

Roy made off with a wave. “I just do.”

After Roy left, Will Graham filled up his car and then drove up the road into Wolf Trap, through the woods and out beyond the point the poplar trees gave way to form a clearing.

—

Will Graham lived a largely solitary existence. He preferred it that way. He wasn’t eremitic, but he was never one to keep friends or relationships. The antisocial habits of his childhood followed him into adulthood and everywhere he’d been between Maryland and Louisiana. He and his father were nomadic throughout his school years, so he’d abandoned the need to make friends early on. Being alone, he learned very quickly, was simply easier.

Buying a farm in Wolf Trap at his age got him a few funny looks from his colleagues. _What does a single guy in his late twenties need a farm for?_ But he didn’t care. Anything beat his old D.C. apartment in Foggy Bottom where he’d lived—mostly out of financial necessity—for nearly four years. The place was cheap and the landlord never raised the rent, so Will renewed the lease after finishing grad school and saved up for a down payment with his first two years of Quantico money. Even from Wolf Trap the commute to work was more or less the same. And the move gave his beloved little mutt Ellie all the open space she needed to run around. A man and his dog, and soon he’d have more. That was the way to be.

His specialties, on the other hand, required otherwise. The fields of psychology and forensics were hardly suitable for the people-averse, yet they were where Will excelled, and they were why he was in the FBI. Rather, why he _taught for_ the FBI. The former could be true if it weren’t for the strict screening procedures that disqualified those lacking sturdy mental bearings.

Instead Will taught in the forensics department and often consulted informally on cases. His knack for deducing motives and deconstructing crime scenes was unparalleled and highly sought after. He was an agent without needing to deal with all of the agent paperwork.

When he was first starting out he would take work home most days. It seemed to be a side effect of the unhealthy eagerness that came with beginning a new job and being desperate to prove one’s worth. In his apartment he had a desk against a window that looked out onto the busy streets of Foggy Bottom, and with an unnatural diligence that had since waned, he would sit there and go over cases late into the night.

In the evidence photos the dead were always dead. Outside, down on the street, families vacationing to D.C. would pull up to hotels, exhausted from traveling, and the sounds of their laughter and sleepy excitement would climb in through Will’s window, find him, and suffocate him with the reminder of being alive. And suddenly the dead in the photos were no longer dead. The dead were once living.

He learned to close the window after that, and eventually he learned to leave work at work.

Occasionally he wondered if it’d do him some good to keep a steady relationship. He’d tried dating before, in college and grad school, but more for the intimacy than anything; his guardedness proved a sore spot for anyone who tried to get too close to him. Moreover he didn’t know what the nature of his job at the Bureau would bring to a relationship. Then he’d think about the living and the dead and decide he would rather not find out.

That was largely the appeal of a place like Wolf Trap. He had always fared better on his own. And it was better not to mess with the things that weren’t broken.

—

On Saturday morning a knock on the door woke Will from restless sleep. He looked at the time and it was close to ten. Probably another neighbor welcoming him to town with a homemade dish; for such a small and sparsely populated town, news of his arrival seemed to get around fast. People from the surrounding properties had been dropping by unexpectedly all week, remarking on his lack of furniture or a well-stocked kitchen. On more than one occasion someone would joke that that was to be expected of his generation.

He wasn’t good at casual conversation and despised eye contact, but he endured their visits. Mainly because he felt guilty that they had all gone to the trouble of making him food.

Still half-asleep, he put on a pair of pants, made a halfhearted attempt in front of the mirror at pressing down his unruly brown curls, and washed up before getting the door. Ellie got up from her bed and trailed behind him, her tiny paws trotting over the hardwood. At the last moment he grabbed his glasses from his desk by the window. His vision was perfectly fine, but if he put them on and positioned the frames just right he could avoid looking anyone directly in the eye. Will Graham was nothing if not resourceful.

Ellie followed him to the desk and then hid behind his legs when he opened the door.

A man who couldn’t be younger than his grandfather greeted him on the porch. In fact, he reminded Will so much of his grandfather that a moment of panic seized him when he remembered the old man had been dead for over ten years. The man at the door seemed to register this—the panic, at least—and quickly moved to speak.

“Just a neighbor,” he said. Perhaps he thought Will took him for an intruder. “Heard you just moved out here a couple weeks ago.”

“No, I—yeah, I did, at the end of September. But no, I figured… You just look a lot like my grandfather.”

“Could I be?”

“He died in 1995,” Will clarified, “so no, probably not.”

“Probably.” The man smiled. “You know, it’s been a long time since anyone’s moved out here. But I’m sure you’ve heard that one already.”

He was holding a small brown bag like the ones Will’s father used to use to pack his school lunch. Will half expected the man to hand him a sandwich and a juice box. If he noticed Will staring at it he made no indication, and instead continued to talk.

“This is a good plot you’ve chosen. Last owners took care of this house all right, but they moved out to the suburbs, you know how it goes.” He paused, but Will had nothing to contribute but a nod. “You have to do a lot of fixin’ up on it?”

“No, sir. Just need to redo the back deck, some of the wood’s rotted. In the kitchen there’s some rusted pipes and the range needs a deep cleaning. Um, and the oven runs cold, but I probably won’t use it much.”

“I guess it’s a good thing the whole town’s got you stocked up on food, then.”

“I guess so.”

For a moment the man stood there silently, soaking in the view of the surrounding land. Especially for one person, it was plenty. The house sat in the middle of a generous plot of open space that was probably once proper farmland, with the woods not too far off and a creek just beyond them. Somewhere within the wood was the road that led back to town and out to the highway. Nearby the house there was an old barn, situated about the farmland, that Will was already using to store an assortment of tools he’d brought up from his father’s house. And just outside his front door the oak and maple trees already bore the colors of autumn.

While the man observed the view, Will observed him. It was an involuntary habit that he hated to do. It made him distrustful. But he couldn’t help it, and besides, couldn’t think of anything else to fill the silence. So he observed.

He couldn’t gauge anything about the man except that he was in his late seventies and probably lived alone. There was a band on his left ring finger, but his partner had likely either died, left him, or, at the very least, was infirmed. Surely they would have come with him—in this town, meeting the new neighbor seemed to be a spectator sport. He was thin but not gaunt, with good posture, and his clothes were old but well-fitted, suggesting he probably kept active or once worked in a field that required it. And he had a penchant for holding conversation, otherwise he would have gotten his formalities over with and left—another indication that he lived alone. Apart from that, Will could only intuit that the man seemed to have been living here his entire life and knew every piece of the land as if it all lived behind his eyelids.

Then Will tried to shove all of that information to the back of his brain so he could focus on whatever the man said next.

After looking around, the man spoke up. “That barn out back was built maybe back in 1868 or ’69,” he explained. “And the original house—gone now, but it was right out there by the creek—was just a little shack, and the folks who lived there built it themselves. A young couple; wanted to live out here where it was quieter than the city. They were poor except for a few chickens and cows they’d been given as a wedding gift. Wasn’t until their son was older that he got the idea to start selling eggs and milk to turn things around. You been to that general store out on Towlston?”

Will shook his head.

“Well, that was his. It was the only store in town for a while. Thanks to that he ended up with enough money to fix up the barn a bit and build this house. Met his wife in New York and raised their family here. This whole place was in that family for three generations, and all the babies were born in the barn until they smarted up and started trusting hospitals.” He paused for a second, then said, “You know, for some reason that was pretty par for the course for Wolf Trap. We haven’t got a hospital and yet a lot of the older folks were born right here.”

Will gave a perfunctory nod. “You seem to know a lot about the place.”

“A byproduct of living here all my life.” He smiled, warmed by the reminder. “I’ve seen a lot of folks come and go from these parts. It’s small enough that everyone knows each other. Or at least of each other.” He paused again, looking wistful. “My kids all moved out to D.C. and Baltimore for college and ended up staying there. Tried to convince me to leave when their mom died. And an old man like me probably shouldn’t be living alone. My daughter already got a room set up for me at her house, but I can’t seem to bring myself to go.”

Once again a nod was the only response Will could think to give. The prospect of being tethered or called somewhere by family was something he had never felt himself. He’d moved from place to place so often throughout his life that he learned to never attach himself to the concept of home. Familial bonds were another tricky concept for him; his mother had left when he was two, and his father, while loving, lived his own separate, untethered life and let Will live his. Well, maybe that’s where Will had gotten it.

“Not much of a talker, are you, son?”

Will shifted on his feet awkwardly. “Always preferred listening to talking.”

The man seemed to think about this. Once more his eyes wandered about the plot, then fixed on the blanket of poplar trees at the plot’s edge. “You know, there’s an old urban legend about those woods over there.”

Will’s eyes followed and focused on the trees. He waited for the man to go on.

“The story itself is true. There was a young couple, a boy and a girl, who lived here in Wolf Trap, just behind those woods where the Cross County Trail passes through now. They were practically children—both of them maybe seventeen years old—but they knew they wanted to get married. This was about the time of the American Revolution.

“Of course, they needed men for the army and were promising all sorts of benefits if you enlisted and fought. The young man volunteered, hoping to earn some money and land to get them started when he got back. Left in June and was dead by the end of the year. When word of his death got back home, his poor girl was so devastated that she wandered out into those woods right there, delirious and calling for him in the snow. She ended up freezing to death. Luckily they were able to find her in the morning—the snow had come down hard overnight and she was practically buried.”

“Jeez.”

The man went on, gravely, “They say that when it snows you could go into the woods and see her roaming about, calling out for him.”

“You ever go out there yourself?”

“I did once. Didn’t see or hear a damn thing. But plenty of my friends went, and so did my kids’ schoolmates. Probably went themselves, though they never told me.”

“Did they see her?” Will asked. This felt ridiculous; he had never bothered much with urban legends. But now he found himself genuinely curious.

The man nodded. “Some of them did. What’s weirder is that a lot of them didn’t see her, but they did see _someone_. Man, woman, whatever. Sometimes it was someone they knew, who of course would maintain the next day that they hadn’t gone nowhere near the woods that night.” The man paused. “Isn’t that strange? Like their subconscious playing tricks on them.”

“Or trying to tell them something,” Will offered.

“That’s what I think, too. Maybe her ghost doesn’t haunt the woods, but some part of her soul does.”

“The part that was searching.”

“Searching, yes. Searching for her lost love.”

Will looked back to the woods. The poplar trees and their beautiful bright yellow leaves were the farthest thing from haunted, but their naked branches in the winter would probably be another story. For a moment Will considered that the old man had just made the whole thing up as an excuse to stay in Will’s company. _Yeah, whatever helps you sleep tonight._

“You do any fishing?”

The sudden subject change relieved Will. “Yeah, I do,” he said. Finally, something he knew how to talk about. Not only that, but then the man handed him the brown bag he’d brought over. It was like Will had just passed some sort of test.

“Housewarming present. I figured you’d already got enough to host a potluck and I’m a lousy cook besides.”

Will opened the bag and there was a single fishing lure inside.

“Have you got a lady, son?”

“What?”

“Or a man,” the man added. “Can’t always assume, I’ve learned.”

Either way Will was thrown by the question. “I—no, I don’t.”

“Ah. Well, anyway, you know they say it’s good luck to name your bait after someone you love? The fish’ll bite every time.”

“Funny,” Will said, “my grandfather told me the same thing.”

“How old are you, son?” the man asked curiously.

“Twenty-eight.”

“Hmm.” The man chuckled to himself. “Then I’m really not him. My oldest grandson is twenty-five.” Then he paused and added, “Besides, I would’ve remembered you.”

After that they talked about fishing spots around the county, and after that the man went home. He didn’t bring a car, he’d explained, since he was in the middle of his Saturday walk along the Cross County Trail. When Will closed the front door he remarked to Ellie, “Really reminds you of Papa, huh?” even though she’d never known Will’s grandfather. And then Will realized he didn’t even ask for the old man’s name.

—

The first snow of the season came in early November, when the trees were not yet fully bare of their autumn leaves. The dogs in particular enjoyed the change. Will had adopted another not long after settling in, a German shepherd, so Ellie could have a friend to run around with. The new dog had grown up in a better home than Ellie had, but his previous owners were now too weak to continue caring for him. Out of respect for them, Will kept his name: Jack.

Jack adjusted well to the farm. He was used to open space, having come from a farm nearby, and could probably find his way around Wolf Trap better than Will. In fact, Jack was practically Will in that he remained constantly alert: he was protective of the house, of Will, and maybe most of all, of little Ellie. But when the snow came he let the protective veneer drop and he and Ellie both tumbled around in the snow like children seeing it for the first time.

Meanwhile, Will was spending most of his hours at work. It was well into midterm season, which meant that on the days he didn’t need to be on crime scenes he had plenty of tests and papers to catch up on. He’d established a rule a few months into his job at Quantico to never bring work of any sort home—he never knew what would follow him back from his desk and hide under his pillow—so he was always one of the last to leave for the day. As the days grew shorter he was often in the classroom grading well past sundown. And every now and then work would follow him anyway, into his station wagon and down the Dulles highway and off the exit in Vienna that led to his farm. Jack and Ellie would sleep next to him in bed those nights, and never because he explicitly asked.

The morning after the first snowfall, he let Jack and Ellie out into the front yard and watched them from the porch. He was nursing his third cup of coffee after the previous night’s homicide case left him with a restless sleep, and would have slept in longer if the sight of fresh snow hadn’t caused such an early morning clamor about the house. The dogs tumbled through the powder and looked back at him as if to make sure he was watching.

“What do you guys think?” Will asked. “You like the snow?”

Jack barked and Ellie wagged her tail, which Will took as a yes.

Not even yet thirty, Will was mostly against the idea of parenthood. It was probably for the better that no child inherit the uncontrollable quirks and darker complexities of his mind. But his dogs felt like his own children who were only capable of inheriting whatever good parts of himself there were. He cared for them, grew cross with them, worried about them the way a good parent would. And this overwhelming, almost terrifying love that he felt for them was probably the same love a good parent felt.

When the initial wonder died down, Will took the two of them for a walk. He often took them on the trail that cut through the woods and eventually ran parallel to the creek. The woods were shaded, but not so crowded that light couldn’t come through. They were well-used by dog-walkers, hikers, and runners alike, and it was easy to find one’s way out and around even without paying much attention. The cover of trees grew thicker the more north it went, closer to where the babbling and running of the creek just entered earshot, just before the thick silence of the forest could swallow one whole. At that point it was always one’s safest bet to turn around.

Normally Will could hear the trample of runners’ shoes crunching through the leaves, or would inevitably have to exchange awkward smiles with other dog owners whose dogs would come and sniff curiously at his. But today the chilly temperatures and the new cover of snow seemed to keep everyone inside. As far forward and behind as he could see, nobody else was here but him. And up until now the forest floors were always papered with newly fallen leaves in a mosaic of orange and yellow and red for the dogs to run around. Now the swaths of leaves were completely blanketed over, and the few colorful leaves that remained on the trees were dusted lightly with a precarious layer of white.

Suddenly the old man came to mind. Will had not seen the old man since his visit to Will’s house some weeks before. The lure he’d gifted Will still sat on the desk by the window, since Will hadn’t found the right opportunity to use it yet. He often thought of the old man and how he spoke about family and how much he reminded Will of some of the only family he’d ever had. Now he thought of the story of the dead frozen girl in the woods.

Up until now Will hadn’t thought about the story at all since the old man had told it to him. He put as much stock into it as he would any other urban legend, which was very little. It probably helped that his dogs had an excitement for the woods that was contagious enough that Will couldn’t associate the woods with anything else.

Occasionally, though, on some of the nights when he returned home well past midnight, Will would be standing outside of his car and taking in the night air and making out the shapes of the landscape in the darkness when suddenly the sight of the woods would disarm him, their towering silhouettes seeming taller than before, as if they were watching him from right behind the maples and oaks surrounding the house and closing in on him with silent footsteps. Only then would the woods seize him with terror—a thick and suffocating terror that would make him hold his breath and not let it out until after he’d made it behind the front door and flipped on enough lights to wake up the dogs.

The snow came down for over a week after the first night. It was an unprecedented amount for so early in the season and drove many people to hunker down inside. Only Will continued to walk his dogs as often as they needed him to oblige them, and he was fond of the newfound privacy the snow cover was affording him. No more awkward interactions with neighbors as long as it could be helped. And his dogs kept each other enough company that they did not seem wanting for their neighborhood puppy friends.

Now he found himself remembering the story of the girl every day. Only in a quick flash of association, though, thanks to the snow. It never frightened him. It simply felt like a piece of history connected to the town as much as the story of the general store owner and the house did. Besides, the woods were harmless in the daytime as far as forces of nature went, not to mention beautiful enough to ward off any nightmarish associations. Normally the thought would pass and he could go the entire day not remembering it again.

He was taking the dogs on their morning walk when it returned. This time the thought did not pass. He was no stranger to invasive thoughts and would usually try and invite something more calming to take their place. As a distraction he started making a mental list of supplies he needed to insulate the barn; the hardware stores were probably open and he could go later in the day. But still his train of thought would return to the girl and how she’d died right here in the woods, quite possibly in the spot just under his feet.

Ahead of him he could see the thickening cover of trees and the creek stilled and quieted to ice. Then, farther in the distance, there was a pale girl in her long tattered dress, limping and grasping at the tree trunks, her face distorted in a silent mournful cry. She did not notice him. She barely seemed to notice the cold.

With a blink she was gone. He looked ahead and behind and around and—but for the dogs—he was still alone.

But he could not get the image of the girl out of his head. The poor child had ventured this deep into the woods until the blood slowed down to a frozen halt in her veins. He wondered how long they had tried to find her in the night before giving up and who had discovered her rigid body in the morning.

He stopped walking and the snow beneath his boots felt loose and unstable. He imagined the torso of a corpse buried underneath, or a rotting head with the eyelids iced shut, or the small hands of a child, blackened with frostbite and reaching as if to claw their way back to the surface. In his mind he could see her eyes, wide and constricted with the kind of panic that only came after doing the irreversible. And with the mental images came a heavy sense of dread.

Will shook the feeling off as best as he could. Then suddenly Ellie bolted away so fast that Will jerked forward with her leash. Jack was off-leash and not too far ahead, but he immediately sprang in front of Ellie, on guard as he growled at the spot where Will had been standing. Will’s eyes darted, now fully alert, following Jack’s sightline to look for the threat. He could see nothing but the tracks he and the dogs had left. There were no noises but the ringing sound of blood rushing in his ears.

As the calm resettled he took a closer look around. The snow-dusted branches were empty ahead. They were empty, too, to the side towards the creek and to the opposite where, far beyond the trees, sat his farm. As far as he could tell, he and the dogs were still alone.

There was one spot he still had yet to check. But for some reason he did not want to turn around.

—

At night Wolf Trap receded into the darkness. It was an old town and there weren’t enough paved streets throughout the residential areas to justify putting a line of street lights up. Only the road off of the highway was lit, but the farther down it went, closer to Will’s house, the darker it got, until there were no lights altogether. It was not uncommon for motorists to get lost while driving through in the dark of night. Usually they either called for help or, when it was warm enough, waited in their cars until there was enough light out to recognize their surroundings. Seasoned out-of-towners learned to avoid this by staying out of Wolf Trap at night altogether.

Even Will, who often enjoyed being outside in the middle of the night and walking about his property, never ventured too far from the house in the dark. Only once did he wander off completely, nearly a mile out and into the woods. It was after that first snowfall in early November, around the start of that year’s first major snowstorm, after he'd seen the ghost of the girl by the forest. After that he never went back into those woods at night as long as he could help it.

After Will brought the dogs home that morning, he went to the hardware store and worked on the barn and then suddenly it was night. The days felt shorter when it snowed, more so than they already did—probably owing to the lack of sunlight piercing through the thick cover of clouds—and while Will preferred the cold to the Southern summers of his childhood he disliked the quick onset of darkness. Darkness invited the things that normally hid in shadows to come out into the open. For Will, that was a lot of things.

When the sun went down, Will hurriedly cleaned up his work in the barn and went back to the house. Typically he could ignore the darkness but tonight he was uncharacteristically scared. The dogs also seemed a little off. He dismissed it and made them their dinner and then made his own. After a couple of hours of sorting through some old books left by the previous owners, he poured himself a finger of whiskey and then got ready for bed.

Sleep never came, which did not surprise him. This tended to happen only after a particularly gruesome case at work, but he knew the events of that morning’s walk had left him unsettled enough. He laid on his back trying to conjure dreams but only ghosts stained the backs of his eyelids. Finally, once he was no longer afraid the ghosts in his mind would be on the ceiling when he opened his eyes, he decided to give up on sleeping altogether.

Will’s bed was downstairs at the front of the house, in the main room across from the fireplace. From his bed he could easily look out the front windows for anyone or anything approaching, and the windows were large enough to give a nearly full view of the field and farmland. Now fully awake, he sat up in bed and strained his eyes until he could make out the silhouette of the woods at the edge of the horizon. It wasn’t very hard; moonlight washed over the field and surrounded the house with a white glow. And the woods always looked closer at night.

Ghosts weren’t real, Will knew that much. They were figments of the imagination, nothing more than a trick of the light preying on the subconscious. Maybe the girl’s ghost wasn’t real, but Will remembered how the old man said people often saw someone other than the girl all the time. People they knew. _People go into the woods, searching for someone they love, whether they know it or not._ Was that how that conversation had gone?

Either way, the idea suddenly gnawed at Will. Who would he see? He had never been in love. Nor had anyone with whom he’d been intimate stuck out enough in his memory. Making connections was not his strong suit, and he knew better than to let people get too close—or to do it himself. Perhaps he could go into the woods and see nobody at all.

He threw back the covers and searched in the dark for his boots.

—

The walk to the woods was neither long nor hard. Even tramping through the snow and around the higher snow piles it took Will less than twenty minutes to reach the edge where the poplar trees started to cluster. It was two a.m. and below freezing, but the walk had warmed him up enough that the beanie and thick pants and jacket he’d thrown over his pajamas almost felt like overkill. The only thing he needed to worry about was that it could start to snow at any moment.

The moonlight filtering through the naked branches helped Will see through the woods, all the way to the point where the darkness of the forest began. He had a flashlight in his back pocket in case he would need it, but figured that as long as he stayed out of the forest he would be fine. From where he stood the forest looked like a solid black wall, a distinguishable, solid edge that would be easy enough to stay away from. But Will knew that thinking like that was why people disappeared in forests all the time. He turned away from the forest and followed the path down the other way.

It had occurred to him that this was not necessarily a good idea. Wolf Trap wasn’t known for crime, but it was isolated enough from the beaten path that if he had to call for help it would take a long time to find him. He would be safer in his bed in his house with the dogs than out in the woods alone with just a flashlight and a cell phone. As he walked through the trees he had a thought that maybe he should have brought a gun.

But strangely enough he felt safe; he could see no person or animal around and the silence was so still it rattled his eardrums. His breaths and the sound of his boots bringing up the snow behind him were probably the only noise being made for over a mile around.

Still, he walked slowly, straining his eyes in every direction for a sighting, looking at the snow for tracks or footprints. Would a ghost leave footprints? Would they even make noise? More importantly—what would he do if he saw one? He pictured himself walking up to one, looking at them—through them?—and reaching out, just to see whether his fingertips would brush through or touch a solid form.

At this point he had stopped imagining it was the girl’s ghost he was looking for. At this point, he was hoping to just see _someone._

Up until now, if anyone asked, Will would say he was fine with spending his life alone. Friends and lovers were hard to keep and the way he was didn’t exactly mesh with the way most people were. Being alone was less a resignation than the easier choice, and it had worked for him for a long time. But now he found himself hoping ghosts were real just for the chance of a revelation that maybe it didn’t have to be.

After twenty minutes of walking Will’s motivation waned. The brimming curiosity he’d had when he first entered the woods was now mostly lost to the trail of footprints he’d made behind him. He felt embarrassment over going through with the idea and a slight disappointment that nothing came of it.

Yet even with this feeling he also felt at peace. There was a new tranquility that did not seem to exist in the day in the stillness of the trees, the biting cold air, and the snow, which, save for his footsteps, was perfectly undisturbed. The moonlight painted everything, sights and sounds alike, with a gleaming, ethereal haze. On TV all those ghost hunting shows made deserted places look so menacing and eerie, evil lying in wait in every hidden spot, but this felt like the opposite.

He stopped in a clearing and took a long, deep breath, in and out. A stray snowflake caught his cheek and when he looked up he could see snow flurries beginning to come down. This was probably the signal for him to give it up and go home. But he stood for a few moments more, thinking about the dogs and if it would be too cold to bring them out in the morning. Then he braced himself for the walk back—he would need to retrace his footsteps before the snow came down too hard.

Will turned around and there was a man standing at the dark edge of the forest.

Immediately he ran. His first instinct was to hide behind the largest trunk he could see and try his best not to panic. But the flurries were still too light to cover his tracks and he knew there was no safe use in hiding. Still he hid, and he forced himself calm and listened as hard as he could for any movements the man would make.

After a few minutes of listening Will heard nothing. He tried to recall the man’s appearance but all he had been able to make out was a pair of slender legs and broad shoulders. There was no mistaking that whatever he’d seen had been a person. Surprisingly they were not terribly bundled up despite the temperature. Will wondered if whoever they were had seen him first. Then he wondered if they were real.

He had hidden with his back against the tree trunk, and when he turned around to check, the figure was gone.

He could see no new footsteps—none beside the ones he’d already left, and none on the other side of the tree. Unless this person was taking some unconventional roundabout way through the woods to get to him, Will tried feebly to chalk it up to just seeing things. It was late and he hadn’t gotten any sleep and it was wiser to leave sooner rather than later. The sooner he left the sooner he could get back to his house and forget about all of this in the morning. Even if the figure followed him home at least he’d have a gun.

Then a hand landed on his shoulder. Will tensed, not sure if it was wiser to stay still or to run. The grip was firm and strong and Will couldn’t tell how easily he could get away. At the same time he sensed no sign of threat or danger. So he stayed rooted where he was, deciding what to do, even as the snow began to fall in heavier flurries. A chill rose in his body, from the tip of his nose all the way out to his toes and his fingertips, taking over the thaw he’d gotten from his walk through the woods. The snow was quickly making the temperature drop. Yet the hand on his shoulder remained warm.

Suddenly at his back there was more warmth. It was as though someone were standing flush against him. The heat radiated from his back to the rest of his body, dissipating the chill that had just settled throughout; only his face stayed cold and numb. He was petrified, yet underneath he began to feel calm. There was something about the warmth and succumbing to it that resembled something he hadn’t had, genuinely at least, in a very long time: intimacy.

Will closed his eyes.

“Are you,” he started aloud, but his voice was stale from disuse. Instead he kept his voice at a whisper.

“Are you real?”

The presence behind him did not budge. Will felt anxiety boiling up in his chest, and alongside it a painful curiosity he did not understand.

“Can I look at you?” he asked.

Again he was met with no response. He still felt the warmth at his back and the grip on his shoulder, heavy and motionless. So he took a deep breath, opened his eyes, and turned around.

—

In Will’s psychiatrist’s office there is a tall window overlooking Baltimore. Will stares out at the dwindling late evening traffic, eyes unfocused as he forces himself to stop seeing red. Behind him his psychiatrist quietly rises from his desk; he moves quietly enough to raise suspicion, but Will does not particularly care. It has been a whirlwind enough of a week. He is reeling from killing someone—a murderer who eluded the FBI for months—and from orphaning that murderer’s daughter in the process. He does not need the knowledge of his psychiatrist helping her hide the body of a man she’d just killed on his plate. He has enough to digest.

Hannibal comes to stand by the window and Will can immediately feel a pair of eyes burning into him. The man is charming, professional, disarmingly polite, and probably the last person anyone would suspect of being an accomplice to murder. Will is surprised that he feels not entirely surprised, but files that feeling away for later. Right now he is thinking about how the hell to convince Jack Crawford to get him a different psychiatrist.

More immediately, he is thinking about Abigail. She is not his daughter, but being responsible for removing the last parental figure from her life he feels like she is going to have to be. Will, who has never experienced a moment of familial obligation in his life save for towards his seven dogs, suddenly feels like he is a father. It seems Hannibal, who was there when it happened, feels the same way.

“We are her fathers now,” Will hears Hannibal say, almost psychically, his voice far away in Will’s echo chamber. He only has a split second to consider the implications of Hannibal saying _we_ when Hannibal comes up and places a hand on his shoulder. Hannibal’s hand lingers there, his grip firm and unyielding as he stands imposingly behind Will. He is not much taller than Will, but his broad shoulders dwarf Will’s slight frame enough that Will feels small in his presence. Neither of them move until Hannibal gives Will’s shoulder an assuring squeeze and lets go.

The gesture feels so familiar that Will’s mind goes blank. On his shoulder the imprint of Hannibal’s hand burns as though it’s branded in, the warmth lingering around it. There is a heat at his back, but he can no longer tell if Hannibal is still there.

Will closes his eyes and strains to find the memory. He is afraid to open his eyes for fear he will find himself younger and standing in the woods, snow covering his boots as something lurks in the dark behind him. How real the hand on his shoulder had felt that night—and how real his shock when he turned around to find nobody there.

Will stands by the window for a few minutes more, long after Hannibal has already resumed tinkering at his desk. For some reason, he does not want to turn around.


End file.
